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| Imagining a future within the lifetime of a child born today ... Young mothers and their newborns at Sunshine District Hospital on Victoria's basalt plain. |
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| Photo by Merrill Findlay, 1996. |
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| In this imagined future young people 'feel part of the biological world, not separate from it, and see themselves as custodians of the planet, not despoilers of it.' Students revegetating Truganina Swamp at Laverton. |
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| Photo by Andrew Shannon for the City of Hobsons Bay. |
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In 1994 I was invited to represent Imagine The Future Inc. at a sustainable development congress in Altona, a coastal suburb in Melbourne's industrial heartland, and home to both the endangered Altona Skipper Butterfly and to Victoria's petrochemical industry.
This visionary gathering of local government officers, state and federal bureaucrats, economists, industrialists, scientists, business people, local activists and many others was hosted by the Habitat Melbourne Trust and what is now the City of Hobsons Bay. All of us who participated were already committed, in one way or another, to reducing the impacts we humans have on the biological communities we depend on for our survival. We didn't necessarily agree with one another, of course, but there was a general feeling that the principles of ecologically sustainable development had to be taken seriously by all sectors of our society, and that the business of this Congress was to discuss how these principles could be implemented.
My brief was to talk about how people's images of the future influence our individual and collective behaviour in the present, to drag us, sometimes kicking and screaming, it is true, into a new future reality. As I quietly sat in that auditorium listening to everyone else's presentations I tried to imagine what the future could be like if all the most positive ideas being discussed at that Congress were actually implemented. What would such a future look and feel like?
Naturally what I was imagining was a very subjective vision of the future deeply coloured by my own biases and passions, but in imagining it, I felt I was weaving together some of the threads of the stories other people were spinning at that Congress. And that is when I committed Imagine The Future Inc. to Re-dreaming the Plain ...
Australia's economic powerhouse: a possible future on the basalt plain
The future I articulated at that Sustainability Congress in Altona is not tomorrow, or next week, but some time within the life of a child born today. Once more the basalt plain is the economic powerhouse of Australia, as it was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, the plain is one of the most economically successful industrial and post-industrial regions of the Pacific Rim, although if you're still thinking in terms of those old nineteenth and twentieth-century chimney stacks, pipes and drains spewing 'externalities' into the air and water and onto the land, you'll never comprehend this future. We still have manufacturing industries of course, but it's all 'closed-system' production now, which means NO discharges into our biological systems. Because this is the era of Zero Emissions. No more greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, no more ozone-depleting compounds from refrigerators and air conditioning systems. No more polluted air, no more poisoned steams or water tables, no more contaminated land. Because any 'waste' created in one industrial process is now considered a valuable commodity to be used as a resource for another industrial process. Even our sewage and left-over food are finally acknowledged as being too valuable to be 'wasted' and are recycled into fertiliser for our food crops - which means no more artificial fertilisers.
Sustainable energy
Of course most of our energy is from renewable resources in this possible future. A range of radically new technologies and improvements to old ones has been developed like people wouldn't have been able to even imagine in the twentieth century, including improved wind generators, micro-hydro systems, new kinds of very efficient solar roofing and cladding, and windows and other surfaces that generate power using chlorophyll chemistry.
Many of these systems feed excess energy into the public grid, but some are designed as independent units to power individual buildings or communities. Per capita energy consumption has dropped by over 80% compared to 1990s consumption. This is partly because of good passive solar design, general energy efficiency, and the practical support state, federal and regional authorities have given to retro-fitting older buildings with new insulating materials and new energy technologies. But perhaps a more significant factor in reducing the consumption of energy was the integrated and consultative approach to planning and urban design, based on the principles of ecologically sustainable development, as articulated in the 1990s by the Australian environment movement.
Planning for sustainability
The integrated and consultative approach to planning and urban design in this possible future has meant that all public recycling, transport, energy and water systems now serve communities in ways that are much more efficient and ecologically benign than they ever were in the past.
We're particularly proud of our rapid mass transit services and our public recycling and composting units, for example. Many communities are completely self-sufficient in both water and energy, which means that, even though populations have increased, we don't need to build new dams or power stations, or transport water or energy long distances any more. Even most of our food is now grown locally.
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| 'The beauty and wholeness of the now-healthy wetlands, grasslands and woodlands of the plain have precipitated a kind of spiritual renaissance for many communities.' A wetland near Geelong. |
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| Photo by Mark Trengove. |
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People want much more than good public transport and efficient resource management, though. We want to live in communities that allow us to enjoy rich and fulfilling personal lives. This demand for diversity, complexity and intimacy in community life, on top of all the other environmental and aesthetic demands, presented some of our older urban planners, architects, engineers and social scientists with challenges they had never had to consider before. But they coped!
Sustainable living
Once more biologically and socially sensitive production processes were instituted, the demography of the basalt plain changed extraordinarily quickly. With all the toxic twentieth-century industrial processes gone, developers were able to build new and beautiful structures that reflect both the biological and cultural diversity of the plain - and soon people were choosing to live in interesting places like Altona because of the high quality of life they could enjoy there, rather than because it was close to the factories and petrochemical plants where many worked. And with these changes came a new sensitivity to other species, especially locally endemic ones, like the Eastern Barred Bandicoot, Striped Legless Lizard, Small Golden Moths Orchid, and Altona Skipper Butterfly that were once threatened with extinction. Our towns and cities are designed now in ways that allow us to live with these species more harmoniously instead of threatening their very survival, and we take great pride in our biological diversity, as we do in our cultural diversity.
People are also choosing to continue their education locally at the various live campuses of Victoria University, which is now one of the most progressive learning institutions in the world. It achieved this reputation because, unburdened by a long tradition, it was able to innovate rapidly to meet both the new aspirations of the people who live on the plain, and the needs of a more 'globalised' world.
The future of work
We've also re-defined our old ideas of 'work' in this possible future. It had always been obvious to anyone with the eyes to see that people want much more from life than a 'job' and a 'wage'. So now we've developed local economies to redistribute our collective wealth in ways that are more affirming, empowering and equitable than they've ever been before. We've cured those old social diseases of 'unemployment' and youth alienation, for example, and our policies to nurture and affirm both cultural and biological diversity have allowed many of the most negative cultural prejudices and tensions to dissipate. Without them, our society is much more socially sustainable. Our political structures reflect this changed thinking too: they are more democratic and more representative of the whole population than they used to be.
Spiritual renaissance
Despite the regional population growth and industrial development, we've consciously preserved and rehabilitated habitats for the diverse native species we share this imagined future with, and have established habitat corridors so land-based creatures can move across the plain as they would have before it was so heavily urbanised and farmed. And our collective understanding of what is beautiful has changed too, because now it is 'normal' for us to design our gardens and public spaces as grasslands or wetlands or woodlands, and to 'boast' about how many once-endangered bandicoots, lizards, parrots and butterflies we've seen in our 'back yards'.
And those once contaminated streams are now freshwater havens for all kinds of indigenous species, and the saltwater marshes, thousands of hectares of them around the rim of Port Phillip Bay, have become a source of great inspiration and succour. Each year we celebrate the arrival of the first migratory waders from Siberia or Japan, for example, and 'compete' with our friends to see the first of the orange-bellied parrots returning from their Tasmanian nesting grounds.
The beauty and wholeness of the now-healthy wetlands, grasslands and woodlands of the plain have precipitated a kind of spiritual renaissance for many communities. Young people, in particular, are now making what they call 'pilgrimages' to other parts of the world to help 'heal' the damage done to the planet over the last few hundred years ... because, they say, they feel a spiritual bond with the earth. They feel part of the biological world, not separate from it, and see themselves as custodians of the planet, not despoilers of it. The new identity these young people share transcends all the old ethnic, class and religious divisions, and is a powerful uniting force in the world.
Well, I could go on and on with this possible future cobbled together from all the papers presented at the Altona Sustainable Development Congress in 1994. You will, I'm sure, fit the pieces together in different ways according to your own personal biases and knowledge bases. But what's important is that now we have positive images of the future. We can imagine it, we can talk about it - and now we also can work together to make it real. An ecologically sustainable society here on this basalt plain, here on this planet Earth. A future that makes you want to be there.
What are your stories about the future of the basalt plain? What are you doing to help make your imagined future real?
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc. and Australian Film Commission, 2002.
Text by Merrill Findlay for ITF.
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